About Last Night

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

BROADWAY:
• Cabaret (musical, PG-13/R, virtually all performances sold out last week, closes Mar. 29, reviewed here)
• A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder (musical, PG-13, nearly all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Matilda (musical, G, nearly all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Les Misérables (musical, G, too long and complicated for young children, reviewed here)
• On the Town (musical, G, contains double entendres that will not be intelligible to children, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:
• The Elephant Man (drama, PG-13, contains partial nudity, all performances sold out last week, closes Feb. 21, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN CAMBRIDGE, MASS.:
• Saint Joan (drama, PG-13, remounting of off-Broadway production, closes Feb. 8, original production reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN FORT MYERS, FLA.:
• One Slight Hitch (comedy, PG-13, extended through Jan. 31, reviewed here)

“A man of great common sense and good taste—meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.”

George Bernard Shaw, “Notes: Julius Caesar,” Caesar and Cleopatra)

Noël Coward sings “Deep in the Heart of Texas” on Together With Music, telecast on CBS in 1955:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)

“Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness.”

Pablo Picasso (quoted in Quote, Mar. 24, 1957)

From 2005:

Johnny Carson, who died this morning at the age of 79, devoted most of his adult life to that most ephemeral of endeavors, hosting a late-night talk show. I must have seen several hundred episodes of The Tonight Show in my lifetime, and I even went out of my way to watch the last one, yet I doubt I’ve thought of Carson more than once or twice in the thirteen years since he retired, just as I doubt that anyone now alive can quote from memory anything he said on any subject whatsoever….

Read the whole thing here.

“The vast accumulations of knowledge—or at least of information—deposited by the nineteenth century have been responsible for an equally vast ignorance. When there is so much to be known, when there are so many fields of knowledge in which the same words are used with different meanings, when every one knows a little about a great many things, it becomes increasingly difficult for anyone to know whether he knows what he is talking about or not. And when we do not know, or when we do not know enough, we tend always to substitute emotions for thoughts.”

T.S. Eliot, “The Perfect Critic”

Mosaic, the online magazine of Jewish thought, recently published an important essay by Nathan Shields called “Wagner and the Jews” that has caused much discussion. The editors invited Ed Rothstein and me to respond to the piece. My response is out today.

Here’s an excerpt:

In one of those grisly juxtapositions that are so characteristic of life under the aspect of postmodernity, my first reading of “Wagner and the Jews” was interrupted by the breaking news of the Charlie Hebdo massacre and its aftermath, a second massacre in a Paris kosher supermarket. The smoke had hardly cleared before a prominent British newspaper was publishing a story that started off like this: “More than half of British Jewish people fear Jews have no future in the UK, according to a new study which also reveals that anti-Semitic sentiments are more prevalent than widely believed.” Stephen Pollard, editor of the Jewish Chronicle, had already informed the world that “every French Jew I know has either already left or is working out how to leave.” Europe, it would seem, is well on the way to becoming—to use a term favored by Richard Wagner’s most prominent admirer—Judenfrei.

Hence the uncanny timeliness of “Wagner and the Jews,” in which Nathan Shields takes a searching and persuasive look at the ways in which Wagner’s operas embody his anti-Semitic obsessions. The human capacity for self-deception is and will always be infinite, but I cannot imagine that any lover of Wagner’s music who reads Shields’ essay with an open mind will thereafter find it possible to erect a cordon sanitaire separating the composer’s operas from his ideas. They are consubstantial, as he meant them to be, and those who think otherwise are ignoring the self-evident assertions of their creator, who believed his work to be the New Testament of a religion of art…

Especially in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacres, the contemporary parallel with the identically all-encompassing fanaticism of radical Islam is impossible to ignore. The history of the twentieth century, as Shields reminds us, was a history of political Gesamtkunstwerken, a succession of failed totalities, one of which was brought into being by a painter manqué who took care to assure the world that “I became a politician against my will. If someone else had been found, I would never have gone into politics; I would have become an artist or a philosopher.” So, too, is radical Islam just such a totality, a monolith in which both the personal and political are religious. Like Hitler and like Wagner before him, the mullahs are deranged idealists who hate the world as it is and wish to make it over again. They come as saviors and offer us redemption, and in return all we need do is surrender our selves….

Read the whole thing here.

Wilhelm Furtwängler and the Berlin Philharmonic perform Wagner’s Meistersinger Overture in 1942 at a “Strength Through Joy” concert given at a German factory. The performance comes from Zeit im Bild, a Nazi propaganda film:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)